Tag Archives: British Veterinary Association

In part 1 of this post, I mentioned the books written by the vet James Herriot. His reminiscences are no doubt coloured up for better entertainment, but they’re also authentic records of veterinary life and of the changes, good and bad, brought to it during the later 20th Century. In fact librarians, undeceived by the slapstick elements, shelve them under ‘Animal Husbandry’ (Dewey Decimal 636). So it’s worth having a look at one such book, The Lord God Made Them All, before returning to today’s veterinary scene.

The book was published in 1981, but is set in the years following the Second World War, when veterinary medicine was just starting to take advantage of the antibiotics whose development had been hurried forward by the needs of that war. Herriot astonishes some of his farming clients, and himself also, with the new therapies, and at the end of the book, his partner Siegfried Farnon contemplates the changing scene with characteristic optimism:

Look at all the new advances since the war. Drugs and procedures we never dreamed of. We can look after our animals in a way that would have been impossible a few years ago and the farmers realise this. You’ve seen them crowding into the surgery on market day to ask advice – they’ve gained a new respect for the profession and they know it pays to call the vet now … There are great days ahead!

The suggestion is that the interests of animal, vet, and farmer (the client) would in future be more nearly at one. And certainly the problems of a three-way pull – what the modern British Veterinary Association calls the “veterinary surgeon’s trilemma” – has been well illustrated in the earlier parts of the book. In Chapter Ten, Herriot injects a cow for ‘foul of the foot’ (Fusiformis necrophorus) with one of the new drugs. The foot is miraculously healed, but the site of the injection, the cow’s jugular vein, develops phlebitis, and shortly afterwards the cow dies. Herriot is painfully upset about the cow, of course: “To any conscientious veterinary surgeon, killing a patient is a terrible thought”. Then there is the loss to the farmer, severe enough to raise “the possibility that he might be going to sue me”. Finally, “I had lost the practice a good client, and that was not a pleasant thought either.”

It happens that the farmer in this case is a very sympathetic character, and the disaster stops with the cow, so that the story simply shows two humane people doing their best for an animal – the standard model, one might hope and suppose, of the veterinary scene. But not all the Dales farmers are so humane. One of the cartoons by Larry which illustrate the earlier editions of these books shows Herriot attending to another sick cow, while a farmer gloomily watches, a thought bubble above his head picturing a cash register with money falling out of it. Even the vet, says Herriot, “must always have the farmer’s commercial interest in mind”, and tell him or her “when treatment is obviously unprofitable”. It must be so, while animals are traded goods.

And then there is the larger conflict or contradiction, unaffected by the humanity or otherwise of the farmer or vet. Herriot calls it “the fundamental sadness of a country vet’s work – that so many of our patients are ultimately destined for the butcher’s hook”. He himself, for all his obvious kindness, is necessarily reconciled to this sadness, and is, besides, himself a ‘mighty trougher’, to use his own phrase. When that cow with phlebitis dies, it’s an index of Herriot’s dismay that he can’t face the “nice slice of home-fed ham” laid out for his breakfast, but there seems to be no ironic intention in that phrase: the conscientious man has simply lost his appetite.

However, he surely does feel and intend the irony in those words of Siegfried Farnon’s about looking after our animals in a way that would previously have been impossible. For what, among other things, those new “drugs and procedures” turned out to have made possible were the progressive de-naturing of the life of the farm-animal and the kind of “looking after” which is practised on the modern factory farm – that cruel and squalid scene which vets today find themselves servicing.

And now at last, as I said at the end of the previous post, the veterinary profession seems to be hoping to get some ethical grip on this development, and more generally on the human/animal relation as mediated by the vet. In the BVA’s document Vets Speaking up for Animal Welfare, published in February, the three-way pull is given a proper ethical formulation. In future, it says, the interests of the animals will be

our explicit aim and motivator … working with our clients and being economically viable are enablers for us to improve animal welfare … The veterinary surgeon’s trilemma (arising from our duties to animals, clients and our employers) will never be far away but the BVA, in considering veterinary surgeons’ primary motivation, will provide leadership on the principle of the veterinary profession being animal welfare-focused. [Here and in subsequent quotations, I have added the italics]

Specifically in relation to farming, here are some of the BVA’s intentions, as summarised in the document:

Develop a position on humane, sustainable animal agriculture that includes the importance of animal welfare in sustainable development, defines stakeholders that the veterinary profession should consistently account for (those whose interests would be affected by decisions made) and considers how their interests should be weighed by an animal welfare-focused profession • Review BVA’s own food procurement policy in light of an agreed position on humane, sustainable animal agriculture • Link advocacy on priority animal welfare problems to increased consumer awareness of assurance schemes that seek to address these problems.

The civil service prose makes this all sound rather abstract and office-bound, but the intention is clear enough, that vets should occupy at last their proper role as animal advocates, both individually in their daily work and as a profession. In fact the BVA has already been campaigning alongside – though not, as far as I know, in collaboration with – Animal Aid on the subjects of CCTV in slaughterhouses and non-stun slaughter (see the Times, 12 May, p.22). Before the recent national and local elections, the BVA sent a “manifesto” to all the candidates, putting its concerns on these and other matters. And although the new policy is evidently being purposefully directed by the current President of the BVA, Sean Wensley, it has been based on extensive consultation, during which the profession’s members have made clear that this is what they wish their profession to be like. In fact the policy builds on a slightly earlier publication issued jointly by the BVA and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, and entitled Vet Futures, where similar intentions were expressed:

We need to clarify the expectations we have of ourselves – and the public has of us – in terms of challenging any practice that undermines animal health and welfare. Vets and veterinary nurses need to feel confident that they have the authority and expertise to speak out, and will be supported by their peers when they do so.

The crucial anomaly, Herriot’s “fundamental sadness”, remains, that a vet’s work with farm animals will entail keeping them fit to be killed and eaten before they reach maturity – as children, in fact – just as a research vet’s work means fitting animals for premature death in the laboratory. But it’s significant that the BVA document itself makes the comparison with child-care: “We [i.e. the public] expect a paediatrician to prioritise the best interests of their young patients, enabled by the child’s parents/guardians and the doctor’s skills and resource.” And it’s certain that we don’t expect a paediatrician to prepare children for the table, or for the laboratory bench and incinerator. True, the word ‘interests’ is used there, rather than ‘rights’, a word which does not appear in the BVA document. Still, the concept of rights is plainly implied, and perhaps most plainly of all where the document speaks of animal welfare as “a rapidly evolving social concern, following on from moral progress towards women, minority groups, people with disabilities, children and others”. That sequence has been habitually and convincingly put forward as part of the animal rights argument. Now at last the veterinary profession has acknowledged it, and means to act accordingly.

Of course Mr Hyde is meanwhile still busily at work in the profession, notably in the research world (which unfortunately the BVA does not even mention). The Royal Veterinary College, for instance, seems to have taken no part in the new vision. The Animal Health Trust (the “pre-eminent” charity studying and treating ill-health in animals) is a licensee with the Home Office, and joins the RVC among the signatories to the vivisectors’ ‘Concordat’. Veterinary journals still publish gruesome laboratory research, and their solemn cautions to prospective authors, as to the welfare of the animals used, turn out to be no more than reminders of the 1986 Act. And so on. In fact readers of Robert Louis Stevenson will recall that the savage Mr Hyde does finally prevail over Dr Jekyll, though at the prompt cost of his own life. Since March of last year, UK vets have (quite rightly) been permitted to title themselves ‘Dr’: let’s hope it’s a prognosis of their increasing commitment to the more civilized of those two models of the human being, the one that doesn’t start by destroying its fellows and end by destroying itself.

[References: the BVA’s Vets Speaking up for Animal Welfare: BVA Animal Welfare Strategy (2016) and the joint BVA/RCVS Vet Futures: a Vision for the Veterinary Profession for 2030 (2015) can both be read online. The quotations from The Lord God Made Them All (Michael Joseph 1981) are taken from the BCA edition of the same year, pp.348, 84-5, and 234.]

In reply to a Freedom of Information request, the Royal Veterinary College, which calls itself “the largest and longest-established vet school in the English-speaking world”, has recently made public its part in vivisection. During 2014, for instance, it conducted “procedures” on 9,589 animals. All the cats (57) and nearly all the dogs (80 out of 82) involved in these procedures were companion animals, and the research was (as far as I can understand) a quite proper extension of the treatment being provided for them by RVC vets – “clinical” research, in short. These companion animals were returned home afterwards. That leaves about 9,450 animals, including pigs, rabbits, sheep, and domestic fowl. These ones were used and killed afterwards in the normal prodigal way of experimental laboratories. Much of this research was “basic” research into physiology and pathology, aimed not at devising or testing therapies, but at producing the sort of general knowledge which, so the RVC claims, “underpins both veterinary and human medicine”. A large part of the “applied” research was specifically directed towards human medicine.

The RVC states, in its defence, that it “shares society’s desire to minimise the use of animal experimentation and increase the use of scientifically validated alternative methods that reduce, refine or replace the use of animal models.” So this organisation – dedicated, one would suppose, to the health and welfare of animals – thinks it reasonable to have to reassure us that it’s not less concerned about their suffering than the rest of the community is. And unfortunately we do indeed need such reassurance. For this is an organisation signed up to the vivisectors’ new PR collective, the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research. And it isn’t just doing its own research on animals, but has a Contract Research Unit which is keen to provide “a range of services for both animal and human health-related companies, ranging from small biotechnology to large pharmaceutical as well as pet nutrition companies.” Vivisection for hire, in fact.

Nothing so new about that, of course. Some of the most notorious names in contract research of this kind – Huntingdon Life Sciences, for instance, and Wickham Laboratories – were set up by vets. And even veterinary training, the RVC’s core business, has its own tradition of betrayal. In fact it was the shocking revelation of what was being done to horses at the Alfort veterinary school near Paris which inspired the earliest anti-vivisection campaigns in the 1860s. This same Alfort establishment, incidentally, prides itself these days on possessing a campus “dotted with several monuments and statues that remind visitors of figures who have worked for the betterment of humanity”. And that of course reflects the thinking about animals at such places. The grand project is to do humanity good, each animal species being dedicated (by nature, God, evolution, custom? We aren’t told) to serve that project in its special way, with help or, if necessary, coercion from the vets. Indeed, the very concept of species seems to have been re-modelled to suit this convenient taxonomy of involuntary service, for we’re told that the RVC’s contract service will provide biomedical data, or whatever other information is wanted, on “cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, poultry, companion animals and laboratory species”. A dog, it’s clear from RVC practice and policy statement, may fall into either of the latter two categories: ‘species’, then, is not a scientific term here, but a commercial term (‘Who paid for this dog?’).

Meanwhile there is at least one vet retained by every laboratory whose job it is to supervise the welfare of the animals: that is, the “Named Vet” required by the 1986 Act. One might think of him or her in police procedural terms, as the ‘nice’ vet. There certainly was such a nice vet in Oxford University’s laboratories, until recently. An interview which she gave to Nature in 2006 was headed ‘Caught in the Middle’. The ‘middle’ she meant was that between two opposing parties, the researchers and the anti-vivisectionists. However, it’s clear that she was more problematically caught between two opposing obligations, the one as an employee co-operating in the work of a research laboratory, and the other as someone who promises at graduation to put the interests of the animals “ABOVE” (the capitals are there in the graduating declaration) those of clients and employers. That Sarah Wolfensohn really did take this latter obligation seriously no doubt had its part in her abrupt departure and replacement by a Biomedical Services department, headed by an in-comer from – of all ominous places – Huntingdon Life Sciences. Sarah Wolfensohn is now Professor of Animal Welfare at the University of Surrey.

It’s quite possible, incidentally, for a Named Vet to be also an experimental scientist, and so to be supervising, as a vet registered under the Veterinary Surgeon’s Act, his or her own work as a scientist licensed under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act. I don’t know quite who or what’s in the middle of that crazed situation, but it can be taken as an image of the veterinary profession in general, ambivalently serving and exploiting its patients.

One of James Herriot’s books of stories about veterinary practice was titled If Only They Could Talk. But the wish should really be ‘if only they could pay’, because the vet’s essential dilemma is always that the commissioning and paying is done by someone other than the patient, someone who therefore decides what constitutes being well enough in the particular case. Thus a recent issue of the British Veterinary Association’s journal, Veterinary Record (February 2016, vol.178 (6), p.141), has a report on an apparently new pathology observed in broiler chickens, a condition named – with wretchedly evocative force – ‘wooden breast’. In case you wondered why it mattered, the second sentence establishes the context: “This condition is reported to cause significant economic losses because it causes rejection from human consumption.” The cover of the journal illustrates the point with a photograph of a crowded broiler shed. This scene, we suppose, is what the vet must help to make profitable. So ‘being well enough’, in the broiler case, means being alive and eatable six or seven weeks after birth.

It’s a puzzle to know what the Record’s readers, most of whom are likely to be in small-animal practice looking after the health of animals hardly less comfortably placed in life than themselves, think about such a chaos of values. Perhaps they have simply become inured to it, but of course there are vets who do actively object, and who even take a lead in animal advocacy (VERO’s André Menache is one such). The good news now is that the profession as a whole means to follow their example. That cover photograph on the Veterinary Record may not after all be intended as an uncritical illustration of the status quo, but rather as a challenge or query, for the editorial in that same issue announces that the profession’s guiding associations, the BVA and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (not to be confused with the RVC), are determined that the role of the vet in animal welfare shall change for the better. There’s a welcome and portentous revision going on, which I hope to say more about next time.